Contents

Desktop

Pichai says that Chromebooks are ideal for anyone who doesn’t want to deal with the complications that come with more traditional operating systems.

[...]

“We have 160 million users of the Chrome browser and for them, buying a Chromebook would be the most seamless transition ever. If you’re already using Chrome sync, and you log in to a Chromebook and first time, it’s all there.

Why is it OK to have three remotes with a total of 200 buttons just to watch TV, but if a computer interface has more than two steps to do anything, that’s unacceptable?

[...]

Everybody’s too embarrassed to admit that they don’t know how to use a phone, so they MAKE SURE THEY KNOW HOW TO USE A PHONE. Being computer illiterate, however, is trendy and fashionable. It’s considered cute in our society to giggle tee-hee-hee, “I’m a computer-dummy!” But to be a phone dummy? Now you’re ostracized from society, handicapped, crippled, can’t even get a job or a date!

The moral I learned after my pride was shattered: You don’t have to be a genius anymore to use Linux. Any plain, regular individual may use it provided that he or she remembers it is something different and thus wants to learn about it.

Games

Fun tank fight and strategy game Digitanks will be soon ported to Linux. The developers of the game have launched a new exciting 5 for $5 gaming bundle but 4 out 5 games are for Windows, the only one for Linux being Steel Storm : Burning Retribution. In the same announcement post, they have said that a Linux port for Digitanks is on the way.

Ninety percent of today’s Linux distributions “can be easily used by just about anyone when properly configured and presented with a couple minutes of explanation to the new user,” wrote Thoughts on Technology blogger and Bodhi Linux lead developer Jeff Hoogland in his post on the site.

Gentoo Family

We’re once again here to announce the immediate availability of Sabayon 6, one of the biggest milestone in our project.
Letting bleeding edge and reliability to coexist is the most outstanding challenge our users, our team, is faced every day.
There you have it, shining at full bright, for your home computer, your laptop and your home servers.
Because we do care about our community, we do listen to our users, we consider them part of the game, we decided to leave GNOME3 out for another, last, release cycle, in order let things to settle down: providing a broken user experience has never been in our plans.

Red Hat Family

Red Hat Inc. (RHT: News ), the world’s largest seller of Linux software, said Wednesday after the markets closed that its first quarter profit rose 35% from last year, as revenue surged 27% amid strong demand for its products and services.

Red Hat Inc. (RHT), the largest seller of Linux software, aims to triple sales to $3 billion in five years, helped by the rising popularity of cloud computing, Chief Executive Officer Jim Whitehurst said.

Red Hat shares are likely to rise this morning after its latest quarterly results exceeded expectations and the Linux software company upped its guidance for the year.

Meanwhile, the Raleigh-based company has narrowed its search for a new headquarters site to “two or three” and expects to make a decision by the end of the summer, Chief Financial Officer Charlie Peters said in an interview.

Red Hat’s top brass talks a good game about being concerned with the global macroeconomic situation, but the truth of the matter is that what Red Hat has is selling despite the economy, or maybe because of it. And all that the world’s largest beneficiary of the open source community needs to do is not screw it up and it will break the $1bn mark this fiscal year.

Debian Family

But what about Debian Squeeze, the project’s Stable release? Stable Debian releases traditionally don’t get new packages in their core repositories. That means LibreOffice will be included in the next Stable release, the current Testing release (Wheezy). Wheezy will be declared stable sometime in the future. I’d say a year from now.

Some would argue that Unity doesn’t make things easy, though. At least in terms of desktop customization, Softpedia’s tutorial is worth looking into for this reason. The tutorial walks you through cleaning your desktop, installing the Cairo dock, installing a new GTK2 theme, and making final touch-ups.

Community outcry against Unity will continue for the next couple of years, but easy-to-follow documentation for it is appearing, and, in the end, it will probably make Ubuntu friendlier for many potential new Linux users. If you are brand new to Ubuntu itself, also check out our guide to free Linux resources.

Oneiric development is in full swing and with Feature Freeze still 7 weeks away, most of the intrusive changes are landing in the development release as we speak. Alpha 2 will be released in two weeks which should be a great time to check out what’s currently happening. As always: the status overview might give you an idea how each feature is progressing.

[...]

In 2004 I had been using Debian for a couple of years already as my exclusive computing experience and enjoyed it very much. Looking back it’s a bit hard to say why I never got involved in Debian immediately.

Phones

Android

Google is activating some 400,000 new Android devices every single day now(source) and Android is already the fastest growing and most popular smartphone OS in many parts of the world. In tune with its rising popularity, Android’s applications base is also showing stupendous growth. We have already featured a bunch of must have open source Android applications and now here is a collection of Android apps dedicated to travelers among you.

Sony Ericsson announced two compact Android 2.3 phones, including a 1GHz, 3.0-inch Xperia Active, which offers features such as water resistance and Ant+ wireless networking — aimed at personal fitness and health monitoring.

Groklaw reports, “In the reexamination of U.S. Patent 6192476 the USPTO has issued an office action in which it rejects 17 of the patent’s 21 claims.”

The site further writes, “While Oracle has asserted seven different patents in its claims against Google, if this reexamination is exemplary of what Oracle can expect in each of the other reexaminations, Oracle will have a hard time finding claims that it can successfully assert against Google, and there lies Oracles conundrum. Oracle either has to agree with the court’s directive to limit the number of claims it will assert at trial, or it is likely the court will simply stay the trial until the reexaminations are complete.”

While open standards give customers options, execs from Dell, VMware and Facebook at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco Wednesday said that open source wouldn’t be the death of innovation or revenues in cloud software and hardware development. However, businesses that wish to survive will need to provide value over and above the commoditized aspects of open computing platforms.

[...]

Unlike proprietary solutions, open source offerings let developers use computing platforms without the fear of being locked in. For them, the advantage isn’t about being free so much as being flexible. “Everyone wants to be in the public cloud, but there are few that want to walk into the deep end and just jump in,” said Derek Collison, CTO and Chief Archictect of VMware’s Cloud Division.

OpenStack is based on a software project originally begun by NASA, designed to manage its computing needs. Since the project was first announced last July, in order to reduce government expenses and keep the software growing, 77 companies have joined it.

Why? Ever since Amazon (AMZN) made a success of its EC2 cloud, software companies and hosting providers have been searching for a way to match it.

With the recent Righthaven ruling effectively declaring Righthaven’s legal strategy a sham, someone going by the somewhat uncreative name “Plessy Ferguson” sent us the following essay claiming that the ruling is a disaster for open source development.

Mozilla

In the announcement, Eich describes how he wrote the first prototype for the script language in just 10 days, 16 years ago; at the time, he was practically the only person handling the development. He also discusses some early milestones, including standardisation by Ecma (European Computer Manufacturers Association).

Complaints pretty much have one thing in common: They claim there isn’t enough ‘new and shiny’ things inside FF5 to warrant a major version. This is illogical thinking because major version means NOTHING when it comes to usability of software. I’ve noticed that I can browse and use FF5 just as easily as I could FF4 and FF3 before it…I still type in URL’s and websites display. My plugins all still work. It starts up a bit faster and websites seem to load just a bit faster…which is good. So why all the whining and complaining?

Healthcare

Of keen interest regarding the VA’s open-source project is: Will the remodeled VistA remain as open as the current VistA is, or will it become more proprietary, subjecting users to an increasing number of software license fees? To look for answers, I’ve asked the VA to send me a copy of Tiag’s winning bid, but some clues can be found in a 72-page document linked to the contract award notice posted June 20 on the FedBizOps website.

Project Releases

The latest release of Eclipse BIRT, Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools, has been made available by the Eclipse Foundation project as part of the Eclipse Indigo release train. The latest version includes a reworked POJO runtime which is easier to integrate into Java EE applications; previously, as BIRT was an Eclipse-based project it relied on OSGi to deploy the report designer and the runtime, but the latter was difficult to configure under Java EE because of OSGi’s classpath handling.

After two months of development, the Blender Foundation and its associated online developer community have announced the arrival of the second stable release of the Blender 2.5 series. According to the project’s roadmap, the next stable update to the open source 3D content creation suite, Blender 2.59, is expected to arrive in August, after which development on the 2.6x cycle will begin, targeting new updates every 2 months.

Public Services/Government

Sirius’ managing director, Mark Taylor, said his company had been engaged by the council 12 months ago to undertake strategic work prior to the roll out of an open source pilot. However, he says Computacenter unilaterally changed a joint report made by the two companies at the last moment and “we were kicked off the project”.

Councillor Mark Wright, who pushed through the project in September 2010, was voted out of his post as ICT portfolio holder a month ago, after a private vote of Liberal Democrat members.

[...]

The ICT portfolio was passed to Council leader Barbara Janke, who has said she is still committed to Bristol’s open source strategy, which she had backed when Wright put it before the Cabinet as an instrument of economic regeneration and part of Bristol’s “Digital City” campaign.

South Korea is pushing to build an open source-based center that will consolidate information on North Korea next year, an official said Thursday.

The envisioned center will collect scattered information made public by media reports, press releases and announcements by international organizations, said the official at the Unification Ministry handling inter-Korean affairs.

Licensing

Law suits involving the interpretation of the GNU General Public License actually tend to be pretty far and few between . . . except in Germany. And that’s where we find the most recent case of interest involving Cybits, a company that makes products for protecting children on line, AVM, the maker of the Fritz!Box router, and well known GPL enforcer, Harald Welte, who in this instance is intervening on behalf of Cybits. This suit involves the actions of Cybits which downloads the Fritz!Box software/firmware onto a user’s computer, modifies that software, and then reloads it onto the Fritz!Box router. AVM brought an action for copyright infringement, trademark infringement and violation of competition law.

Openness/Sharing

When we talk about the upheaval in educational publishing, we often focus on what students read, via digital textbooks, apps, and e-readers and tablets. But there’s another side to all this, and that’s the production of the scholarly works.

Programming

The Eclipse Foundation has announced the release of Eclipse 3.7, codenamed Indigo. The latest version of the popular open source integrated development environment (IDE) introduces some new components and improved functionality.

Eclipse’s modular design and emphasis on extensibility have helped attract a large ecosystem around the software. It is built and maintained like a tooling platform rather than just a standalone application. A great deal of specialized functionality is implemented in plug-ins, allowing the IDE integrate with a lot of external tools and support a wide range of programming languages and development toolkits.

Standards/Consortia

Mankind has always struggled to agree on the best way to do certain key tasks. This is the origin of society itself – every culture that has ever existed has at its heart a shared set of standards by which it lives and through which it interacts with the world around it.

These standards define what is and what isn’t acceptable, and they give the members of that society a shared frame of reference by which they can understand each other. Language, commerce and even religion have all been expressions of that shared set of standards.

Financial messaging standards are a continuation of this trend. Sitting at the heart of virtually all economic activity, from executing the smallest retail transactions to managing massive global institutional businesses, they play a key role in enabling modern society to function effectively.

Nowhere is the cause of standards in financial messaging championed more enthusiastically than at SWIFT. Since its genesis in the 1970s, SWIFT has worked at removing ambiguity and incompatibility in how banks and financial institutions interact with each other, while simultaneously championing security and higher levels of automation.

Bill McCcluggage, deputy government CIO and Cabinet Office director of ICT policy, has sharply curtailed the government’s previous plans to mandate royalty-free open standards. According to reports, McCluggage was speaking to the Guardian Computing Conference in London when he said that the government only intends to implement a handful of open standards.

Referring to government ICT policy, McCluggage said “It doesn’t say we will mandate all open standard, it says we will decide upon a series of open standards and then we will decide which ones to almost fixate upon in terms of delivery.”

Although the policy described by McCluggage may have a better chance of success, it is a step back from the previous policy declaration of open standards mandated across government. That policy had already drawn criticism from standards organisations who objected to the royalty-free element of the UK Government policy.

Civil Rights

EFF has filed an amicus brief [PDF], urging the US Supreme Court to grant certiorari to Timothy Vernor in Vernor v. AutoDesk. This is a first sale case, so I know many of you are interested in this latest development.

Here’s Groklaw’s coverage of the decision by the appeals court last year, and here’s our coverage of the ruling at the district court in 2009, which had ruled in favor of Vernor, only to be reversed by the appeals court. Some background and resources on first sale cases may help you to follow along. Here’s a list of important first sale cases on Groklaw’s Legal Research page. If you recall, Michael A. Jacobs of Morrison & Foerster, who represented Novell against SCO successfully, represents AutoDesk.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

The Pirate Party is constantly working hard to protect the rights of citizens across the country. From the outset we have been vocal critics of the Digital Economy Act. The Act was forced through in the dying days of a discredited parliament and survived a judicial review. It has seen popular opposition and objection from business, it has been rejected by those who it will have an impact on as well as those who must enforce it.

ACTA

With the EU Commission’s announcement of the upcoming release of a memo regarding the signature and ratification of ACTA by the European Union, La Quadrature has sent a letter to Christine Lagarde, French Minister of Economic Affairs. The citizen advocacy group solemnly asks France not to sign this dangerous and illegitimate agreement and encourages citizens from all the negotiating countries to do the same.

There’s a kind of employee stock purchase agreement loophole which permits company owners to buy back stock from non-executive employees at a low fixed price before a merger or acquisition. All the appreciation in company value moves back from employees to investors.

If Silver Lake was funded by Microsoft to begin with, the takeover is a self deal and the $8.5 billion price tag is another Microsoft sham.

[Mac] Users with v2.8 are being pushed an update to v5 regardless of update preferences. I even restored v2.8 from TimeMachine only to have it update itself again within minutes, offering only an option to relaunch the app.

Non free software is an injustice, the extent of which is only a thought experiment or one owner away.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

The question makes no sense because there is no difference between an authorized copy and one that is not. It is rumored that publishers once polluted public networks with watermarked files, but each of those should be considered an authorized copy because the publisher shared it.

Subject: Steve Jobs Wants to Censor You
From: "Josh Levy, FreePress.net"
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2011 18:28:09 +0000
[1]SavetheInternet.com
[1][IMG]
[2]Act Now: Stop Apple's
iPhone
Kill Switch
Dear Larry,
Think you own your smartphone? Think again.
Apple wants to patent a kill switch technology that can detect when
people are using their phone cameras and give corporations the power to
shut them down.^1
Think that's bad? Imagine what would happen if this tool fell into
the hands of repressive regimes. Thousands of people across the Middle
East have used cellphone cameras to document government abuses.
This kind of technology would give tyrants the power to stem the flow
of videos and crack down on protesters with impunity.
[3]Sign our letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs: Demand that Apple stop
developing technology that harms democracy and free speech.
Apple says this new technology was designed to stop concertgoers from
taking unofficial video at live events. But you can bet that
governments and corporations will use it in other, more dangerous
ways - to silence the voices of protesters, political opponents or
anyone else they dislike.
As Steve Jobs obviously knows, smartphones have become extensions of
ourselves. They are incredibly powerful tools for communication
education, political expression, community organizing and just plain fun.
[4]Tell Steve Jobs that WE control our phones: Neither Apple nor
anybody else can dictate what we photograph and film with them.
Earlier this year, researchers discovered that iPhones recorded your
every move for the past year in a hidden but unprotected file.^2 The
public was outraged, and Apple soon announced that it was updating its
software to better protect users.
We must stop Apple again. This new camera-blocking technology is a
pre-emptive strike against free speech. If activated, it would be
immensely harmful to our rights to connect and communicate.
Please take action now to urge Steve Jobs to pull the plug on this
censorship technology.
Thanks,
Josh Levy
Online Campaign Manager
Free Press
www.freepress.net
1. "Is Apple Launching a Pre-emptive Strike Against Free Speech?"
Huffington Post, June 22, 2011:
[5]http://act2.freepress.net/go/4692?akid=2596.9633377.I38UGX&t=1
2. "Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves," O'Reilly
Radar, April 20, 2011:
[6]http://act2.freepress.net/go/4627?akid=2596.9633377.I38UGX&t=2
References
Visible links
1. http://act2.freepress.net/go/4626?akid=2596.9633377.I38UGX&t=3
2.
http://act2.freepress.net/go/4626?ak_proof=1&akid=.9057871.z0WfPP&t=2&akid=2596.9633377.I38UGX&t=4
3. http://act2.freepress.net/go/4626?akid=2596.9633377.I38UGX&t=5
4. http://act2.freepress.net/go/4626?akid=2596.9633377.I38UGX&t=6
5. http://act2.freepress.net/go/4692?akid=2596.9633377.I38UGX&t=7
6. http://act2.freepress.net/go/4627?akid=2596.9633377.I38UGX&t=8

“The [...] message doesn’t have a suggestion of *how* to “to urge Steve Jobs to pull the plug on this censorship technology,” noted the reader who sent it to us. Any suggestions? █

Summary: The stance of the Linux Foundation resembles that of the OIN and Peer-to-Patent, which makes it a peril to real progress in the fight against software patents

OIN and LF (Linux Foundation) are tightly related entities whose position on patents we wrote about a few years ago. Not much has changed since then, except that we have a lot more evidence to validate and solidify this relationship this year (the older post is from 2008).

Those who have followed this site for a while would probably know that we are sceptical of the OIN because rather than abolish software patents it is validating a strategy of getting more software patents to ‘cancel out’ those of enemies of GNU and Linux (more of the latter). Peer-to-Patent takes a similar approach in spirit. We have just found out that Peer-to-Patent liaised with patent lawyers. Are they wasting students’ time and legitimising patents? Read the following from a UK-based patent lawyers’ blog:

Last week’s Peer-to-Patent (P2P) seminar, organised by the IPKat and kindly hosted in Olswang LLP’s cosy rooftop nest in Holborn, is gone but not forgotten. For one thing, this blog is privileged to have some notes from one of those present, Dr Roger J Burt (a European and Chartered Patent Attorney with huge experience of software-related patents).

[...]

There is a particular hope that university students, particularly computer science students for the present pilot, may take part and benefit from learning about the patent system and how it works”.

What a silly idea. If anything, British students need to be taught to reject the patent system and antagonise companies that lobby for software patents. These companies are enemies of their prospective occupation. They are monopolising the field and reducing the number of available jobs in computer science. We were even more saddened to see Jim Zemlin closing his latest interview with the following brow-raising statement:

Zemlin: I think we were speaking around patent reform. I think everyone in the tech industry related specifically to software would like to see a higher bar in terms of quality for patents issued around software because the lack of quality leads to a lot of needless litigation.

The problem is not “quality for patents issued around software”, the problem is “patents issued around software,” right? The head of the FFII interprets this as “Zemlin of LinuxFoundation a supporter of swpats [software patents]” and given the OIN’s approach, it is not exactly shocking. Both the OIN and the Linux Foundation are a bit like front groups for large supporters of Linux, especially the big companies that engage in kernel development for their own benefit. If the LF is a front to software patents proponents like IBM and like Intel, then we need to reassess our take on the LF’s position regarding patents, not just the OIN’s position (which we never truly supported, with exceptions). IBM’s Rob Weir tweets about fake patent 'reform' which goes under the nose of the IBM veteran-led USPTO (Kappos):

That’s not the reform we should focus on. The real reform people want and need would stop monopolies like IBM from getting ‘ownership’ of algorithms. Let us remember that IBM and Intel — not just Microsoft — are behind the push for software patents in NZ — an important subject at this moment because US-based Web sites try to impose their power upon the kiwis, e.g. by claiming “widespread criticism of proposed exclusion and examination guidelines”. This is an utter falsehood. The only criticism comes from US-based giants, their few partners in NZ, and patent lawyers. The population of NZ rightly retests the idea of software patents in this country. To quote the part that is true:

The future of software patents in New Zealand remains in doubt following an almost unanimous rejection of a proposal to exclude computer-implemented inventions from patentability in a recent public consultation.

Let us hope it stays this way. Patent cartels would just love to validate their monopolies in NZ, which would in turn put NZ-based programmers in a position of needing permission from the US to just write simple computer software, however original.

Software patents never made sense, but they made a lot of money for those who produce the least. To insist on the burial of existing software patents (in the US) is not to be armed revolutionists or rebels; it’s just the only rational, progressive thing to do. Developers like yours truly are being assaulted with sanctions so that monopolists can improve their profit margins. █

[T]he team has decided to organise a naming contest for the Amahi application store. My personal favourite so far? Appl store. You know, appl, short for application. It’s sad that they have to go through this, but I fully understand them in not being willing to take on Apple in court.

For those who have not paid attention, Apple sent a threat to an open source project for using the “Appl” word. There is also a trademark on “app store”. As Neil Richards put it, “Apple has already sued Amazon.com for using the term for its own Android store. It was not Apple which conceptualized the name AppStore. The name came from former Apple executive Marc Benioff, now head of Salesforce.”

Isn’t that ironic?

In other Apple news, what Apple calls “pro” is actually outright rubbish, based on this report from another Microsoft sympathiser. She writes:

Apple released a completely overhauled version of its Final Cut Pro software yesterday, much to the chagrin of some of its users.

The early response to Final Cut Pro X is at best mixed, with some complaining that the film editing application lacks XML support, and worse still, is bereft of backward compatibility with previous versions of the software.

Others who use Final Cut Pro are saying it’s too early to be moaning about the application, which Apple said yesterday had been “rebuilt from the ground up”.

The complete re-write of the software has left many film and video editors perplexed by the radical changes to Apple’s Final Cut Pro, which competes with Avid in the film editing software market.

A steady stream of insults against and in support of Apple is currently flowing around the blogosphere.

As we stated many time before, Apple had ripped off so many other companies (not just Xerox) and resorted to using its hype machine. It then pretended that it actually invented what was shamelessly lifted. Apple is currently patenting many ideas on which there is clearly prior art, most latterly this patent on touch screens:

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded Apple a key patent for touch screen functionality on portable devices, such as the iPhone and iPad.

For a little bit of context, Xerox had touch screens even in the 1980s. None of this is new and Apple’s alleged invention is probably a little tweak upon existing knowledge. Apple is the Edison of the 21st century–the aggressive patent troll who is mistakenly believed to be an innovator. All Edison did was take other people's ideas, made minor changes to them, and then claimed credit for them (using a patent). He hacked the patent system. Edison was just a businessman, like Bill Gates. To him, technology was just a way of doing business and gaining power/glory. He happens to be the man behind GE, which is a prominent proponent of software patents [1, 2, 3]. █

Contents

PS3 Hacker Resigned to Prison Sentence after Money Dries UpAmerican hacker George Hotz got all the headlines for his exploits trying to bring Linux back to the PS3, but he was only one of many working towards the same goal. And while Hotz today walks free, not everybody is so lucky.

What’s going on is that you really do have a fatal error in your code, and it’s an error that you can’t see. In fact, it’s invisible. The error is that you have uploaded a file that you created on a Windows machine.

Desktop

The sources pointed out that ARM-based systems using Android were already launched under the smartbook name two years ago with Toshiba and Lenovo both launching products in the retail channel. However, due to weaker than expected demand, the related products were soon phased out of the market.

As mentioned last week, a plethora of Linux power tests are on the way now that we have found an AC power meter with USB interface that works under Linux and we’ve been able to integrate nicely into the Phoronix Test Suite and its sensor monitoring framework. In this article is one of the first tests that have been completed using this power-measuring device as we monitored the Linux kernel power consumption for an old Intel Pentium 4 and ATI Radeon 9200 system for the past several kernel releases. Even this very old desktop system looks to be affected by the kernel power problems.

Red Hat’s Eric Sandeen has written an interesting blog post concerning the size of popular Linux file-systems and their kernel modules. It turns out that the XFS file-system is losing lines of code, while maintaining the same feature-set and robustness, but the EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems continue to have a net increase in lines of code.

Graphics Stack

The remarkable computation power of General Purpose Graphical Processing Units (GP-GPUs) has led them to steadily gain traction in High Performance Computing (HPC). But creating GP-GPU programs can require new programming methods that often introduce additional work and code revisions, or even re-writes, and frequently become an obstacle to the adoption of GP-GPU technology.

Intel’s current-generation “Sandy Bridge” processors continue to sell incredibly well and perform phenomenally relative to AMD’s current offerings and Intel’s previous-generation hardware. Under Linux, the Sandy Bridge support is now excellent if pulling in the latest components (namely the Linux kernel, xf86-video-intel, and Mesa) and only continues to be improved over time with advancements like their new driver acceleration architecture. By year’s end, Intel is expected to launch their “Ivy Bridge” processors as the successor to Sandy Bridge. Intel is already preparing the Ivy Bridge Linux support code.

Applications

Although it doesn’t sync with other computers or a Web-based calendar, it does much of what you would expect from a solid PIM. As long as you’re on the same machine, it’s constantly available. I dislike apps that force me to keep an open window or minimize it to avoid constantly closing and opening them. If you are like me in that regard, you will take very quickly to Osmo’s background feature.

Proprietary

According to a Google Group post by Henrik Andreasson, “We would like to announce that a new open source project is about to land in src/third_party/webrtc.

All details about WebRTC in general can be found at http://www.webrtc.org/. Our goal is to enable Chrome with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs. We are working hard to provide full RTC support in Chrome all the way from WebKit down to the native audio and video parts. When we are done, any web developer shall be able to create RTC applications, like the Google Talk client in Gmail, without using any plugins but only WebRTC components that runs in the sandbox.”

The team is implementing WebRTC into its Chrome browser, which will enable users to chat in real time without having to run clients like Skype. Since its runs in Sandbox, your system remains secure and safe.

Games

It’s been a while since we last checked in with 0 A.D., the open source project which, as I’ve said before and will say again, could have huge implications for the open source channel. Sadly, the game is not yet complete, but it’s made some major leaps in recent months, which the team recently shared with me. Here are the highlights.

PlaneShift is a free and open source MMORPG for Linux featuring a 3D virtual fantasy world. Unlike many other MMORPG’s, there are no surprises of premium content in PlaneShift which will limit your gameplay or unbalance the game. There are no limitations in skills, ranks, abilities, items you can gain with your free account. There are no time limits or additional constraints.

Desktop Environments

Claire Rowland, user experience guru, will be a featured keynote speaker at this summer’s Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin.

Claire is Head of Research for Fjord London, an international digital service design agency and has worked extensively in user experience research and design. Recently her focus has been on a shift in user experience from the desktop toward services delivered through multiple platforms of widely differing form factors and the cloud. Her research and recommendations relate to what this shift means for what users expect from their devices, and what effective design, across platforms and the cloud, looks like. It also addresses what users increasingly care about the most, and what this might mean for Operating System design.

I’m looking forward to working with Xfce directly and more closely after working years with Xubuntu. It’s both easier for us and assures that all Xfce users can enjoy the improvements, not just those who use Xubuntu.

This text is based on a personal interpretation of several events, and as such it reflects one of several potential interpretations, MINE!

On the last GNOME Team meeting there was a small topic to check if it would be interesting to have a GNOME2 spin for the upcoming 12.1 release of openSUSE. It was decided not to provide a GNOME2 spin and somehow this suggests that GNOME2 is dead for openSUSE (unless someone takes the job in).

You can find hundreds of Linux distributions, depending on what your needs are. For this scorecard, we’re focusing on desktop distributions that are fairly popular, well-supported, and have a reliable release history, and strong community. In last year’s scorecard, we started with seven distros — this year, we’ve narrowed the field to six distributions:

* Debian
* Fedora
* Linux Mint
* openSUSE
* Slackware
* Ubuntu

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Red Hat Family

New York, June 22nd (TradersHuddle.com) – Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) closed the trading session at $43.75 near its 50 day and 200 day moving averages currently set at $44.64 and $43.31 respectively. Red Hat’s price action is above the 200 day moving average but below its 50 day moving average, signaling a possible break out.

EC2 has many different operating systems available, including Windows Server and several different Linux versions including SUSE, Oracle and OpenSolaris. (On the horizon are support for Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo.)

A recent Oracle Support note has some Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) customers wondering about Oracle’s future support of Red Hat. But one expert says it’s more a statement of Oracle’s plans for its own database storage management features.

The note, released this spring and updated earlier this month, has to do with ASMLib, a support library for the Automatic Storage Management (ASM) feature of Oracle Database. According to the note, the support library “allows an Oracle Database using ASM more efficient and capable access to the disk groups it is using.”

The developers of Scientific Linux (SL) have released version 5.6 of their Linux distribution. As with the project’s previous versions, this one is a free remodeling of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with the same version number – SL 5.6 therefore also includes all of the improvements that Red Hat added to RHEL 5.6.

In the release email, the developers emphasise the Atom Shine graphical theme as being one of the main innovations, followed by a list of packages that the SL developers have included which are not in RHEL 5.6. Versions of SL prior to 6.0 contain a lot of such packages; in SL 6.0, the developers added only a few additional packages, referring users instead to repositories such as ATrpms, EPEL and RPMforge for additional software.

Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) shares have spiked 4.07% after closing bell today with a the report of a fiscal first-quarter profit of $32.5 million, or 17 cents a share, up from $24 million and 12 cents a share from the same period last year.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

The surprise, for me, was that I could get the majority of my work done on an old, “slow” PC that I’d written off as useless. That’s definitely one of Linux’s charms: it has very modest system requirements.

I also found it very comforting to work without the threat of malware, which is more or less non-existent in Linux. (Of course, there’s always phishing, which is OS-agnostic.)

For my work situation (which, again, is largely Web-based), Ubuntu made a fine substitute for Windows. In fact, I’m still using it, even though my HP has been repaired and returned. I can’t abandon Windows altogether just yet, but that day may come.

Something else to keep in mind: every time you buy a new PC, you’re paying upwards of $100 just for the Windows license. If you buy 10 machines, opting for Linux could save you $1,000. (The trick is finding a vendor that offers the option. I know Dell does.) Ubuntu, like all Linux distributions, is free.

And pretty awesome. If you haven’t tried it, you owe it to yourself to do so. Hit the Download page and check out the “Try it from a CD or USB stick” option.

Web Browsers

At long last, Mozilla has managed to calculate how many Firefox users have at least one add-on installed: 85%. It gets better, though: the average Firefox user has no less than 5 add-ons installed — but considering over 2.5 billion add-ons have been downloaded in the last 5 years, that’s not all that surprising. In total, 580 million add-ons are used every day by the Firefox user base.

We all know that add-ons are one of the best things about Firefox and Firefox users love their add-ons. However there was never any clear data on the add-ons installed untill Firefox 4. In Firefox 4, a new feature was introduces which allows Mozilla to keep track of an aggregate of add-on usage in Firefox.

It seems like now is the time to revisit the notion of integ­rat­ing HTML5 into Sugar itself. I feel that this can achieve a far more power­ful out­come than just swap­ping Browse with Surf. The primary weak­nesses of HTML5, its imma­tur­ity and dearth of good devel­op­ment tools, are being addressed. Microsoft and Adobe are con­tinue to move towards HTML5, which can only be a good thing.

Chrome

Google has been trying out a redesign of Chrome’s famous New Tab page. The new interface is more organized than the previous one as it cleverly categorizes apps and bookmarks into separate screens. The user can slide between the screens by simply grabbing and pushing the mouse in the required direction. Here’s how to enable it on your browser.

I am a software geek and I love new software. As a businessperson, I also want to be as productive as possible when using my software. New software can cause things to stop working and become a productivity killer.

Today I got news about a new version of Firefox. It is my browser of choice and I couldn’t stop myself from installing it. Of course this version comes only a few weeks after the last version was released. The explanation for the quick update cycle was to keep up with the update cycle of Google Chrome. After reading the explanation, it got me to thinking if rapid updates were truly a good thing?

We definitely need browser updates on a regular basis to patch security issues. Yet those updates don’t have to come as a new version with new features (and new problems).

If you demand total extension compatibility it may be worth waiting a few days for incremental fixes to appear for Firefox 5. However, it appears to be much faster than other versions and other browsers, and mostly reliable upon release. That’s yet another reason to expect heated market share competition between Firefox and Google Chrome throughout this year.

Mozilla has officially released Firefox 5, only 3 months after the releases of Firefox 4 following the rapid release strategy of Google Chrome. The idea behind is to bring about changes in the browser as soon as possible and keep the browser up-to-date by creating different development channels.

I’m a Google Chromium (right now version 12.0.742.91) user because of the speed. I found previous versions of Firefox to be just a little too slow. Especially when starting the browser. Through the grapevine I heard people discussing the better speeds of Firefox 5.0, which was released this week. This makes me re-consider using Firefox as my default browser. I took a look at the speed and several of the new features. Here are the results.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Oracle’s broad legal front against Google has been whittled back further, this time by the US patent and trademark authorities, according to Groklaw.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has rejected 17 of 21 claims associated with one of the patents in Java that Oracle asserted Google had violated with Android. The patent in question is number 6192476, one of six Oracle says Google has stepped on.

The leading open source projects were forked and Oracle distanced itself from them. OpenOffice is dead (only to be scavenged by IBM), OpenSolaris is gone, Hudson is gone, Java has become a ‘closed’ technology owned by Oracle/IBM. Java developers may never forgive Oracle for the way it took a U-Turn from its own stand on Java. Now, MySQL is the only major open source project which is being run by Oracle – forks are already in place in case Oracle pulls plugs off MySQL.

CMS

The development of the new Kajona version 3.4.0 took nearly ten months, but it was worth waiting. The Kajona team used the time to refactor many aspects of the system, providing both, visible changes at the user-interface and invisible changes under the hood. Like the release name “berlin” hints at, most of the feedback from this year’s LinuxTag in Berlin was already implemented in Kajona 3.4.0.

Business

Semi-Open Source

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

In a case that could threaten open source GPL licensing in Germany, a Berlin court yesterday began hearing a lawsuit from German DSL router vendor AVM against web-filtering software firm Cybits. AVM charges that by modifying Linux kernel code in router firmware, Cybits is infringing on copyright, while Cybits’ defense claims GPL licensing permits it to alter the code.

Project Releases

The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.58. This is the second stable release of the Blender 2.5 series, representing the culmination of many years of redesign, development and stabilizing work.

We name this version “Stable” not only because it’s mostly feature complete, but especially thanks to the 1000s of fixes and feature updates we did since the 2.5 beta versions were published.

The Tornado project developers have announced the release of version 2.0 of their open source web server. The Python-based, non-blocking web server framework was first released as open source in September 2009 by Facebook, following its acquisition of FriendFeed.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

“Winning the Future through Open Innovation,” is a progress report recently released by Aneesh Chopra, US Chief Technology Officer, to the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) on the Administration’s Open Government Initiative.The report highlights a number of programs at different agencies that represent a wide variety of open innovation techniques, from opening datasets and APIs to creating incentives for competition or testing and certifying open standards.

Less than a week after the report’s release, the Administration launched the Campaign to Cut Waste through the newly-formed Government Accountability and Transparency Board (GATB), an 11-member group which will review and cut about 50% of Federal websites to reduce spending and prevent duplication of efforts.

Programming

Standards/Consortia

The Hungarian government wants to use the Open Document Format, a vendor independent format for electronic documents, as a default for its documents. Zsolt Nyitrai, Minister of State for ICT, earlier this month explained to the parliament that legislation to use ODF by default is being prepared.

The ODF plans were announced on 1 June, during a conference in the Hungarian Parliament “The Parliament of Information Society”.

The F.B.I. seized Web servers in a raid on a data center early Tuesday, causing several Web sites, including those run by the New York publisher Curbed Network, to go offline.

The raid happened at 1:15 a.m. at a hosting facility in Reston, Va., used by DigitalOne, which is based in Switzerland, the company said. The F.B.I. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the raid.

Security

Finance

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and a host of US megacorps are lobbying hard for a massive tax break – and they’re gaining powerful friends in business, government, and labor in support of that effort.

In other words, the answer shall remain secret. Only those deemed worthy by Goldman may see its data, which purportedly refutes the Levin report. The rest of us are kept in the dark. We cannot challenge Goldman’s claims, because we cannot see what they see. They know what they are talking about; we do not. Instead, we must rely on Andrew Ross Sorkin, Holman Jenkins, Dick Bove, and others to reveal the truth.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other owners of large metals warehouses are being scrutinized by the London Metal Exchange after being accused by users like Coca-Cola Co. of restricting the amount of metal they release to customers, inflating prices.

The board of the LME met on Thursday to discuss complaints from aluminum users and market traders, who say operators of warehouses, which also include J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Glencore International PLC, should be forced to allow the metal out more quickly to meet demand.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

While former U.S. Rep. Anthony’s Weiner’s scandalous “sexting” has had a slew of negative consequences for him, it has meant big business for a local company that started making an action figure in his likeness.

There has been a “mad rush” of interest in the latest offering from HeroBuilders.com, a company at 198 Goodhill Road known for controversial figures it makes and sells online, President Emil Vicale said Monday.

Over and over, cable TV and Sunday news show pundits have been telling us that Social Security is going bankrupt, and we have to raise the retirement age or the economy will collapse. These two axioms have practically become common knowledge. The only problem is, there isn’t a shred of evidence that either statement is accurate.

So how did it happen that these erroneous statements have become mainstream American group-think? It’s the result of a sophisticated corporate echo chamber propaganda strategy funded primarily by the Koch brothers for the purpose of turning business-friendly, fringe right-wing ideas into mainstream policy arguments. The echo chamber strategy is very real, and has been perfected by corporate interests over the last several decades. It involves carefully selecting and fine-tuning a message that resonates with the populace, and then arranging to get that message repeated over and over through a variety of credible media sources.

Censorship

From these links you can access what looks like the proposals for a voluntary website blocking scheme, apparently put forward by the Rightsholder Group engaged in Minister Ed Vaizey’s roundtable discussions with ISPs and others.

The documents, sent to James Firth’s blog, set out a dangerous voluntary scheme that would involve ‘expedited court procedures’ and a ‘balance’ between evidence and speed of action. Definitions of what content is to be judged blockable is scarce. References to exactly how such blocking would work, and the consequences, are non-existent. The case for blocking is left unmade, with no analysis about the effects of such measures. There is cursory reference to the rule of law and proper oversight. The proposal, if it is the genuine proposal, adds up to a dangerous revocation of the rule of law where lobby groups would decide what you are allowed to see and read.

It is unacceptable for trade groups and government to conduct policy in this way. Censorship proposals must be made and discussed in public. Many of us will oppose any censorship that impacts directly and widely on free expression. Governments would be wise to assess the strength of our arguments, rather than waiting for trade bodies to find their narrow, commercial arguments unravel once their proposals reach the light of day.

Internet/Net Neutrality

Given the critical role it plays in communication, culture, and commerce, most people now recognize the importance of Internet access. My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes a new report for the United Nations Human Rights Council takes Internet access a step further, however, characterizing it as a human right.

The Netherlands on Wednesday became the first country in Europe, and only the second in the world, to enshrine the concept of network neutrality into national law by banning its mobile telephone operators from blocking or charging consumers extra for using Internet-based communications services like Skype or WhatsApp, a free text service.

A broad majority in the Dutch parliament voted for crucial legislative proposals to safeguard an open and secure internet in The Netherlands. The Netherlands is the first country in Europe to introduce a net neutrality law. In addition, provisions were launched protecting users against disconnection and wiretapping by providers. Digital rights movement Bits of Freedom calls upon other countries to follow the Dutch example.

The net neutrality proposal (Dutch) prohibits internetproviders from interfering with the traffic of their users. Dutch telecom incumbent KPN recently received world-wide media-attention because it planned to charge Internet users for the use of innovative and competitive services such as Internet telephony. The legislative proposal aims to prevent this, while still allowing for measures in case of congestion and for network security, as long as these measures serve the interests of the internet user. A small technical error in the amendment was introduced last minute and will in all likelihood be corrected next week.

DRM

After years of negotiations, a group of bandwidth providers that includes AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon are closer than ever to striking a deal with media and entertainment companies that would call for them to establish new and tougher punishments for customers who refuse to stop using their networks to pirate films, music and other intellectual property, multiple sources told CNET.

The sources cautioned that a final agreement has yet to be signed and that the partnership could still unravel but added that at this point a deal is within reach and is on track to be unveiled sometime next month.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

ACTA

Earlier, we mentioned that a bill from the Mexican Congress opposing ACTA was going to the full Congress today, and apparently the bill was approved. Now, the question is whether or not the Mexican executive branch will try to ignore the will of Congress on this issue and sign ACTA anyway.

The Veterans Affairs Department has awarded The Informatics Applications Group Inc. of Reston, Va., a $5 million contract to be the custodial agent to manage VA’s open source community to modernize its VistA electronic health record.

The vendor, TIAG, is a management and technology services company, which has performed business process and clinical applications work for the Defense Department.

Intellectual Monopolies

Bittorrent is not the only defendant; Tranz-Send has also asserted the ’944 patent against Kontiki, Inc. in this same suit. Tranz-Send is not your stereotypical patent troll. It is a start-up company in the Bay Area focused on “developing the BlockBuster of the Internet, by electronic transfer to computers which are conected to the TV, for the same cost of rental plus a dime.”

Copyrights

these are materials that are in the public domain; public domain means that anyone can do anything with them – including commercial applications. So this condition of “non-commercial purposes” means one thing, and one thing only: although the texts themselves are public domain, the digitised texts are not

This is not really a problem if others are also allowed to digitize and publish the same works or if the copyright assigned to the digital works expires in a reasonable time as all copyright should.

Frederick doesn’t address the details of Righthaven’s setbacks, but says that “unthinking bloggers” are simply “mischaracterizing reality.” … [also] nearly his entire post is one big quote. It is odd behavior for a man who’s gone out of his way to fight online content theft, and even sued bloggers for using excerpts of R-J content.

It is possible that both of these bloggers cut and paste their arguments from the same PR source which hoped there were not enough people interested in both newspapers and games to notice the duplication.

Summary: GNU/Linux proponents are having a field day owing to Linux success in HPC, Web servers, phones, tablets, etc.

BACK in the days, until a few years back, GNU/Linux was in somewhat of a state of emergency. This game had the “critical mass” factor built into it. Ever since, however, particularly in recent years, GNU/Linux advocacy became easier and the FUD against the platform — patents aside — has become very scarce. Several of our readers made this observation independently. If Techrights misses some bits of FUD that need to be countered, please let us know. We just don’t find as much of that as we used to. █